Dev Dossier: David Carey

The role of Producer is stressful and comes with enough responsibility to challenge almost anyone not acclimated to the task. So what kind of person would be crazy enough to do this? Dave Carey shared a little bit about his history with the PlanetSide 2 team and what his days look like.

Q: What does being the Producer of PlanetSide 2 mean?

A: Being a Producer ultimately comes down to executing ideas. Matt, Bill, and Kriegs all have visions and intentions for the game. My job is to make sure I provide those guys with resources so those ideas can become reality.

Also, I need to make sure our corporate goals are balanced against those ideas. They may want to tear out an entire system and redo it from scratch, but it’s my job to counter that idea against the costs and make sure we can actualize it.

Q: What is one of the biggest challenges you have in this role?

A: Balancing what the players need immediately versus long term development is always difficult. Making decisions on whether to have a coder work on a bug fix that I know is on Live and affecting people, or having him develop a new feature that people are requesting is always a tightrope walk.

Cases can be made for either side in almost every instance and need to be weighed against each other.

Q: What is something you’ve done with PS2 that you are really proud of?

I’m too self-critical to feel really proud of anything ;) I am however proud that I am part of a team that cranked out a genre-breaking, truly innovative game in the Dev cycle that we had to work in.

Q: What is an important lesson you’ve learned working on PS2? Minute details matter.

A: I’ve always considered myself very detail-oriented, but an FPS with this scope takes that to a whole new level compared to the previous games I’ve worked on.

Q: What do you like to do in the time you aren’t playing/working on PS2?

Strategy games like Civ/Endless Space, and for more action I like TF2 and Far Cry style stuff. I also like more complex board games like Game of Thrones, and transitioning to casual card games like Munchkin while getting more inebriated

Have other questions for Dave? Be sure to follow him on Twitter and Reddit!